Reportedly they are in talks with San Diego State to move into their new stadium when it's built. Obviously will depend on how much control over revenue and all of that whether it will make MLS happy. Well would be more interesting and better for me personally.
I'm going to go with: every mature soccer country that produces large numbers of good players has the problem that pro/rel solves.
It appears that the case for pro/rel has been solved. Nonetheless, I would like to inform everyone that I am getting up to get ready and attend (with all apologies to the A-League or Indian Super League) the international world championship of closed league football. As an attendee I will get to experience one of two emotions after the match. If the Sounders win, it will be as if they had won promotion and I will walk out of the stadium with the other 70,000 fans with pride and joy that our sweatered lads were promoted to be champions. With a loss by the non-local lads that represent our city myself and the 70,000 other fans will walk dejected as if we were demoted from being champions despite hosting the closed league final. Either way it shall be decided on the pitch. Go Sounders.
I'm not sure what your point is here: MLS is D1. Nobody is saying you shouldn't enjoy your favorite team trying to win the league championship. This is true if you lived in Louisville, too, but then the win would be far more bittersweet.
I guess the point is that a closed league provides the emotion and drama for their fans. I've heard before, that a closed league, ie MLS, doesn't have that emotional aspect of relegation or promotion. It's going to be, as the kids say, lit here today.
The vast majority of the 69,000 American and Canadian fans inside the stadium are passionate about pro/rel and will be sitting on their hands complaining about injustice.
English Premier League 2019-2020 GP W D L F A GD P 1Liverpool 12 11 1 0 28 10 +18 34 2Leicester City 12 8 2 2 29 8 +21 26 3Chelsea 12 8 2 2 27 17 +10 26 4Manchester City 12 8 1 3 35 13 +22 25 5Sheffield United 12 4 5 3 13 9 +4 17 6Arsenal 12 4 5 3 16 17 -1 17 7Manchester United 12 4 4 4 16 12 +4 16 8Wolverhampton Wanderers 12 3 7 2 16 15 +1 16 9AFC Bournemouth 12 4 4 4 15 15 0 16
BTW the league that some have suggested has no consequences for failure since there's no pro/rel has now fired 8 of its 24 managers since the start of the 2019 season for poor performance.
Those two meet immediately after the international break. The Blades have it pretty easy after that until the Holidays when they play Man City and Liverpool away in the course of 4 days, followed by West Ham (h), Arsenal (a), and Man City again (h).
Misrepresentation. Leicester winning the title in their 2nd year back in the EPL was an aberration. As with the talk on ManU ... let's see where they are when the standings actually matter eh?
You don't watch much Prem do you? Because if you had you'd seen that so far Leicester are quite deserving of their place in the table.This is a really good side, well managed, well run, with good players. Don't think they'll challenge for the title but an 80+ point season is perfectly reasonable, and I would bet my house on them getting top four, except that they are now odds on for top 4 so not a good bet. Not sure what this has to do with pro/rel, guessing it's around the idea that pro/rel causes the relative predictability of the prem. But that seems a weird argument when there are so many other factors. The biggest being the players choose their clubs. I mean imagine a world where literally nothing was different in the NFL than college players being unrestricted free agents out of college. That alone would make it harder for smaller markets to compete. Then take away the salary cap and revenue sharing, throw in single elimination playoffs and you have the prem. How do I know? Look at college football. Arguing that pro/rel is the reason for the lack of parity in Elite European football is like arguing a closed league is the reason the US didn't qualify for the 2018 World Cup*. *yep I know people make that argument, guess what they are wrong too.
There is a massive conflation between pro/rel and disparity (and, on the opposite end, closed leagues and parity) as if they have anything to do with each other. Your college football example is spot on, and MLB would be another example for vast swathes of its history. The focus on parity in North American leagues is neither inherent in the closed league system nor exclusive to it. I am not aware of (effective) parity measures being implemented elsewhere (FFP ain't it, obviously, but I'm not super familiar with the inner workings of leagues outside of Europe or other sports, etc.). Parity does seem like a pretty good thing for fans and owners of also-rans, but it's hard know how good it is on aggregate: let's say the Sixers' window closes without a real title opportunity. Was "trusting the process" worth it? Is disparity really a burden on the Premier League's popularity? Or La Liga? Or Bundesliga? There sure doesn't seem to be much evidence of that, even in the U.S. market. But, regardless, I don't think the disparity actually has anything to with the way they've organized the leagues.
Nope but they have the most money, and the chance to offer a player the most exposure among other massive advantages. So within this context yeh they are "Big Market". For the record Liverpool isn't a "Big Market" in terms of the size of the city either. And don't be disingenuous and try and claim that the only fans come from those towns. We both know that's not true.
Seems like that's an argument for college football being able to overcome the "big market" concerns, not an argument as to why big markets will inevitably succeed. And Liverpool is a top 40(?) metro area in Europe and 4th largest in England, so its not exactly a small town when looking at a country or continental scale.